I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.

From this point on things got more and more fragmented, disjointed – jagged. Most of it I can’t remember at all – apart from a few strong sense impressions, the

weird colour and texture of mussels in white wine, for instance … swirls of dense cigar smoke, thick, glistening daubs of colour. I seem to recall seeing hundreds of

tubes and brushes laid out in lines on a wooden floor, and dozens of canvases, some rolled, others framed and stacked.

Soon, painted figures, lurid and bulging, were mingling with real people in a terrifying kaleidoscope, and I found myself reaching out for something to lean against, but

quickly focusing instead – across a crowded loft space – on the deep, earthy pools that were the eyes of Donatella Alvarez …

Next, and in what seemed like a flash, I was walking down an empty corridor in a hotel … having been in a room, quite definitely been in a room, but with no

recollection of whose room, or of what had happened in that room, or of how I’d wound up there in the first place. Then, another flash and I wasn’t in a hotel corridor

any more but walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, quickly, and in time to something – in time, I soon realized, to the suspension cables flickering in geometric patterns

against the pale blue of the early morning sky.

I stopped and turned around.

I looked back at the familiar postcard view of downtown Manhattan, aware now that I couldn’t properly account for the last eight hours of my life – but aware, too,

that I was fully conscious again, and alert and cold and sore all over. I quickly decided that whatever reasons I’d had for walking to Brooklyn had surely atrophied by

now, seized up, been lost to some fossilized energy configuration that could never be re-animated. So I headed back over the bridge towards downtown, and walked –

limped, as it turned out – all the way home to my apartment on Tenth Street.

[ 14 ]

I SAY LIMPED, because I had obviously sprained my left ankle at some point during the night. And when I was getting undressed to take a shower, I saw that there was

extensive bruising on my body. This explained the soreness – or partly explained it – but in addition to these leaden blue patches on my chest and ribs, there was

something else … something that looked curiously like a cigarette burn on my right forearm. I ran a finger over the small reddish mark, pressed it, winced, then circled it

slowly – and as I did so, I felt a deep sense of unease, an incipient terror, tightening its grip around my solar plexus.

But I resisted, because I didn’t want to think about this – didn’t want to think about what may or may not have gone on in some hotel room, didn’t want to think

about any of it. I had a meeting with Carl Van Loon and Hank Atwood in a few hours’ time and what I needed more than anything else – certainly more than I needed

a debilitating panic attack – was to get myself organized.

And focused.

So I took two more pills, shaved, got dressed and started going over the notes I’d made the previous day.

The arrangement with Van Loon was that I’d show up at his office on Forty-eighth Street at around 10 a.m. We’d have a talk about the situation, compare notes

and maybe devise a provisional gameplan. Then we’d go to meet Hank Atwood for lunch.

In the cab on the way to Forty-eighth Street, I tried to concentrate on the intricacies of corporate financing, but I kept being appalled anew at what had happened

and at the degree of recklessness I was clearly capable of.

An eight-hour blackout?

Might that not just have constituted a warning sign?

But then I remembered getting sick in a bathroom once, years ago – actually throwing up blood into the washbasin – and immediately afterwards going back out to

the living-room, to the little pile of product in the centre of the table … and to the cigarettes and to the vodka and to the elastic, malleable, untrackable conversation …

And then – twenty minutes later – having it happen again.

And again.

So … obviously not.

I stopped the cab at Forty-seventh Street and walked the remaining block to the Van Loon Building. By the time I got into the lobby, I had just about managed to

suppress my limp. I was greeted by Van Loon’s personal assistant and taken up to a large suite of offices on the sixty-second floor. I noticed that in the general design

of the place – in the corridors and in the enormous reception area – there was an impeccable though slightly bewildering blend of the traditional and the modern, the

stuffy and the streamlined – a sumptuous, seamless fusion of mahogany, ebony, marble, steel, chrome and glass. This made the company seem, at once, like an august,

venerable institution and a pared-down, front-line operation – staffed mostly, I have to say, by guys about fifteen years my junior. Nevertheless, I had a keen sense that

nothing here was beyond me, that it was all for the taking, that the corporate structure of a place like this was delicate and gossamer-thin and would yield to the slightest

pressure.

But as I sat down in the reception area, beneath a huge Van Loon & Associates company logo, my mood shifted again, lurched a little closer to the edge, and I was

assailed by queasiness and doubt.

How had I ended up here?

How had I come to be working for a private investment bank?

Why was I wearing a suit?

Who was I?

I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions even now. In fact, a few moments ago – in the bathroom of the Northview Motor Lodge – staring into the

mugshot-sized mirror above the stained wash-basin, with the hum and occasional rattle of the ice-machine outside penetrating the walls, and my skull, I struggled to see

even a trace of the individual that had begun to form and crystallize out of that mass of chemically-induced impulses and counter-impulses, out of that irresistible surge of

busyness. I searched, too, in the lines of my face for any indications of the individual I might eventually have become – a big-time player, a destroyer, a spiritual

descendant of Jay Gould – but all there was in my reflection, all I recognized, with no real indications of anything the future might have held, was me … the familiar face

of a thousand shaves.